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dirty step, and launched into the very diatribe Wexford most feared. For a couple of minutes he let him have his head and then he interrupted.
    ‘About Loveday Morgan . . .’
    ‘So-called,’ said Clements darkly. ‘That wasn’t her real name. Now, I ask you, is it likely to be? We checked her at Somerset House. Plenty of Morgan girls but no Loveday Morgan. She just called herself that. Why? You may well ask. Girls call themselves all sorts of things these days. Now, let me give you an illustration of what I mean . . .’
    But before he could, Howard had joined them and silenced him with an unusually cold look. There was a row of bells beside the front door with numbers instead of nameplates.
    ‘The housekeeper lives in the basement,’ said Howard, ‘so we may as well try Flat One.’ He rang the bell and a voice snapped what sounded like ‘Teal’ out of the entry phone.
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘This is Ivan Teal. Flat One. Who are you?’
    ‘Detective Superintendent Fortune. I want Mrs Pope.’
    ‘Ah,’ said the voice. ‘You want Flat Fifteen. The thing that works the door is broken. I’ll come down.’
    ‘Flats!’ said the sergeant while they waited. ‘That’s a laugh. They aren’t any of ’em flats. They’re rooms with a tap and a gas meter, but our girl was paying seven quid a week for hers and there are only two loos in the whole dump. What a world!’ He patted Wexford’s shoulder. ‘Brace yourself for what’s coming now, sir. Whoever this Teal is he won’t look human.’
    But he did. The only shock Wexford felt was in confronting a man nearly as old as himself, a shortish, well-muscled man with thick grey hair worn rather long.
    ‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ he said. ‘It’s a long way down.’ He stared at the three men, unsmiling, insolent in a calculating way. It was a look Wexford had often seen on faces before, but they had almost always been young faces. Teal had, moreover, a smooth upper-class accent. He wore a spotlessly clean white sweater and smelt of Faberge’s Aphrodisia. ‘I suppose we’re all going to be persecuted now.’
    ‘We don’t persecute people, Mr Teal.’
    ‘No? You’ve changed then. You used to persecute me.’
    Assuming that Howard had given him carte blanche to question possible witnesses if he chose, Wexford said, ‘Did you know Loveday Morgan?’
    ‘I know everybody here,’ Teal said, ‘the oldest inhabitants and the ships that pass in the night. I who have sat by Thebes below the wall . . .’ he grinned suddenly. ‘Flat One if you want me.’
    He led them to the basement stairs and went off without saying any more.
    ‘A curious old queen,’ said Howard. ‘Fifteen years in this hold . . . God! Come on, it’s down here.’
    The stairs were narrow and carpeted in a thin much-worn haircord. They led down to a largish lofty hall, long ago painted dark crimson, but this paint was peeling away, leaving white islands shaped like fantastic continents, so that the walls might have been maps of some other unknown world, a charted Utopia. Furniture, that looked too big to go up those stairs although it must have come down them, a sideboard, a huge bookcase crammed with dusty volumes, filled most of the floor space. There were three closed doors, each with an overflowing dustbin on its threshold, and the place smelt of decaying rubbish.
    Wexford had never seen anything like this before, but the interior of Flat Fifteen was less unfamiliar. It reminded him of certain Kingsmarkham cottages he had been in. Here was the same squalor that is always present when edibles and washables are thrown into juxtaposition, opened cans among dirty socks, and here in one of those battered prams was a baby with a food-stained face such as town and country alike produce. It was deplorable, of course, that this young girl and her child should have to live in a subterranean cavern, perpetually in artificial light; on the other hand, daylight would have